Spoke to my CSE professor about children's cognitive learning techniques so I can have a more clear idea of how children can learn effectively from this program that I am designing. Her research is more directed at college students rather than elementary school children, so her focus is more on how to maintain their attention and get them involved in the lecture through use of iClicker and group discussions.
I also spoke to a Professor from the Visual Arts department about how my project is more of a design program rather than art, and what I can do to make sure that this is still "art". Mainly, I should focus on HOW children will be involved in my project. For example, the fractal art that they create through my program while learning math at the same time, will form a collection of generated art that will be displayed as part of my piece. The young students that I plan on holding a workshop for are students from my EDS139 practicum course (Education Studies), who are particularly from low-income families. Because most of these students aren't exposed to the opportunity of higher education, if these young students could see their own works on a art gallery or a university gallery, their views on college education may change and it may encourage them to work harder and achieve higher goals than before.
I began writing my code on Processing, using the basic Archimedean spiral shape...
processing - shapeprimitive, triangleflower, curves, translate, rotate, curvevertex
Archimedean Spiral: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ArchimedesSpiral.html
"Technology in the classroom is only successful if it engages" -Diana Oblinger
It's important that students' input is physically carried out onto the visual that they are playing around with.
Fractals, geometry, math education, art
generative art:
http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/generative-art-links/
Elementary Mathematic Concepts found in Fractals
concrete-representation-abstract instructional approach
concrete stage: teacher begins instruction by modeling each mathematical concept with concrete materials
representational stage: may involve drawing pictures; using circles, dots... etc.
abstract stage: models concepts at a symbolic level, using only numbers
want to incorporate both concrete and representational, but omit the abstract; combination of the "doing" stage and the "seeing" stage
for example, to read and write fractions, the goal for teachers is to have the student develop the spatial organization, visually and kinesthetically
http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/CRA_Instructional_Approach.asp
Electronic Media, Attention, and Visual Spatial Skills
ie: Tetris, third graders experimental group showed improved scores on a paper&paper test of mental-rotation skills
Electronic Media and Problem-Solving Skills
transfer from television is possible, as long as 1. children must understand the content of the program; 2. must create an abstract mental representation of that content; 3. must remember the content and see its relation to the new problem; 4. must apply the remembered content to the new problem.
Fisch recommends program repetition of the same content in multiple contexts, to increase the likelihood of transfer of learning.
http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=32&articleid=57§ionid=256&submit
Child Psychology
concrete objects can help young children understand symbol-referant relations, but ultimate goal must remain to help children comprehend more abstract relations
the best concrete object symbols may well be ones that possess elements of their own destruction, designed to become less necessary or relevant as children come to understand the more abstract representation
http://books.google.com/books?id=reWupx_OJs8C&pg=PA190&lpg=PA190&dq=children+%22abstract+representation%22+cognition+OR+perception+OR+learning&source=bl&ots=0s0lpSbhdw&sig=rVzxft-9su7lvIIlaqC1ROS-T4c&hl=en&ei=lvCtTKSGHY60sAO6tqWvBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=children%20%22abstract%20representation%22%20cognition%20OR%20perception%20OR%20learning&f=false
Visual learners
visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures than in words. They learn all-at-once, and not from repetition and drill. They are whole-part learners who need to see the big picture first before they learn the details. They are non-sequential, which means that they do not learn in the step-by-step manner in which most teachers teach. They are systems thinkers who can orchestrate large amounts of information from different domains, but they often miss the details.
SMART Notebook Math Tools
create lesson activities that inspire participation
explore math concepts using interactivity using interactive protractors and compass
how could the participant interact with the game in creative ways?
read http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160&page=R9
Technology to Support Learning
an important use of technology is its capacity to create new opportunities for curriculum and instruction by bringing real-world problems into the classroom for students to explore and solve
technology can help to create an active environment in which students not only solve problems, but also find their own problems
interactivity makes it easy for students to revisit specific parts of the environment to explore them more fully, to test ideas, and to receive feedback. 197
more effective for creating contexts that students can explore and reexamine, both individually and collaboratively 197
9/30
Project idea 1: a visually aesthetic program/game that can be used as a math learning tool
Using Processing, I want to create an interactive program/game that can be used as a learning tool to practice elementary level mathematics. Young students seem to be more focused and involved when learning is more interactive and game like, especially when the material is on an electronic medium rather than the typical textbook. Also, some students tend to learn better visually rather than through hearing or reading. In my program, I want to put more emphasis on the graphics and motions of the visuals so that the piece camouflages the educational aspect and allows the player to experience some sense of visual aesthetic. Instead of displaying numbers and mathematical functions, the program will consist of random shapes that change in size, amount, and color in relation to the numerical values. The player will use the mouse to move around objects and solve simple math calculations, and visual effects will let them know whether the answer was correct or not.
The most difficult part of the project for me is to come up with how the game exactly works, the rules of the game, and how to present everything as artistic visuals (since I would like to avoid having numbers appearing on the screen). Through some research, I found several artistic programs that create dynamic visuals when interacted through the mouse clicker. These programs called Studio Toys are written by students from Columbia University GSAPP Advanced Studio VI. Their studio, “Computing Kaizen,” explores “evolutionary architectural structure and their potential to anticipate change and internalize complex relations1.” Their programs contain building blocks that can self-organize and morph into creative forms. The creators of Studio Toys used Processing to create these programs. In addition to the design of the program/game, another difficult aspect would be writing the code on Processing.
